My battalion did not take part in the sorties of the days of the twenty-second and twenty-fourth, nor in the defence of the Molino and the positions situated at the back of San José, made glorious by the destruction of many of our troops, where they had made the French feel the strength of their hand. It was not because they had not been careful to take precautions, for indeed from the mouth of Huerva to the Carmen gate they stationed fifty cannon, most of them of heavy calibre, directing them with great skill against our weakest points. In spite of all this, we laughed, or pretended to laugh, at them, as in the vainglorious response of Palafox to Marshal Lannes (who had placed himself since the twenty-second at the head of the besieging army), in which he said to him, “The conquest of this city will be a great honor to Monsieur the Marshal if he gains it in open fight, and not with bombs and grenades, which only terrify cowards.”
Of course, after a few days had passed, it was known that the hoped-for forces and the powerful armies that were coming to free us were all mists of our imaginations, and especially of that of the journalist who invented them. There were no such armies of any sort roaming about to help us.
I understood very soon that all that which was published in the Gazette of the sixteenth was a canard, and so I said to Don José de Montoria and his wife, who in their optimism attributed my incredulity to a lack of public spirit. I had gone with Augustine and others of my friends to the Montoria house to help them at a task that was wearying them greatly. A part of their roof had been destroyed by the bombs, and this threatened the walls with destruction also. They were trying to remedy this with all possible speed. The eldest son of Montoria, wounded in battle at the Molino, had been lodged with his wife and son in the cellar of a house